I’ll be talking about single people and single life in Los Angeles on November 13, 2016, from 3—6 p.m. It should be a lively conversation and I hope you can join us.

Thanks to Kim Calvert, creator and editor of Singular Magazine and the SingularCity social networking community, for hosting this event. (That’s her in the picture at the top of this post, welcoming us to Singular City.) Here is what she posted about the event:

Do you know about those programs in which an entire community or campus or freshman class is encouraged to all read the same book? I just learned that How We Live Now has been shortlisted for one of those programs in Michigan. I haven’t been told which one. I also don’t know how long the shortlist is, so I don’t know what my chances actually are like. I should find out if anything comes of this by around the end of Nov.

[Bella’s intro: If you are interested in marriage and its discontents, especially as represented in beautifully written literary novels, then you are probably a fan of John Updike. Volumes have been written about Updike, but I’m betting you have never seen anything quite like the essay about Rabbit, Run written by the brilliant Professor of English, Jaclyn Geller. She believes that Updike offered not just a critique of marriage, but of an entire ideology of marriage dominant in the 1950s. The protagonist of the Rabbit series, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, wants to run from marriage, but finds nowhere to run to.

I previously wrote a chapter for a scholarly volume on a topic that seemed to interest a lot of readers: “Single, no children: Who is your family?” Like many academic books, that one was outrageously expensive ($240 for the hardcover, $98 for the paperback). Happily, I now have permission from the publisher to reprint my chapter in a brief collection of a few other writings of mine on family (some new, some previously published). I’ve put them together into a book by the same name as that original chapter, Single, No Children: Who Is Your Family? And, this time, the work is very affordable ($8.98 for the paperback, $3.49 for the e-book).